Google Bans Zoom App Internally Because No One Cares About Hangouts

Thanks to people working from home due to the Coronavirus, Zoom has witnessed an unprecedented usage with 200 million daily users observed in the last month.

However, the same limelight has also put Zoom under the close watch of security researchers around the globe. Now, Google has banned its employees from using the Zoom Desktop app, citing the recent pile-up of security issues uncovered in the video conferencing tool.

In an internal email, Google told its employees that the Zoom desktop app would stop working soon on their corporate computers, provided by the tech giant.

Our security team informed employees using Zoom Desktop Client that it will no longer run on corporate computers as it does not meet our security standards.

This comes as a surprise, as Google already offers a video conferencing tool known as Google Meet. Google Meet and Microsoft Teams are one of the biggest competitors of Zoom.

Google employees using Zoom certainly puts a lot of questions on the capability of Google Meet.

One explanation behind this could be Google Meet’s association with the name Hangouts. Recently, Google dropped the “hangouts” word and decided to call its video conferencing tool as Google meet.

Hangouts is a video calling app and instant messaging service from Google. The service was frowned upon by users due to the lack of features, and frequent app failures. Slowly, the app was shadowed by other popular video chatting apps

Nevertheless, Google forcing its employees to stop using Zoom indicates the severity of security issues in the app. Recently, thousands of Zoom call recordings were leaked online, and many of them were uploaded on YouTube and Vimeo.

Previously, SpaceX announced that it has banned its employees from using Zoom; again, due to security issues. In other news, one of the Zoom’s shareholders sued the company for failing to disclose the privacy and security issues in the app.

On the company’s end, Zoom today rolled out a security update where the software now hides the meeting ID from the title bar. This comes after UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson took a screenshot of his meeting with government officials and uploaded it on the Internet.

Previously, Zoom also apologized for all the security issues in the app and announced a 90-day feature freeze to focus on the problems at hand. However, it appears like Zoom’s issues will not come to an end, at least not until it is seated at the top.